


intolerable acts

by sevenfoxes



Series: the american revolution [2]
Category: Actor RPF, Captain America (Movies) RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF, Thor (Movies) RPF
Genre: F/M, Secret Relationship, i am really terrible at tags, sex and take out food, the internet is forever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 06:10:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4553757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inevitably, the news breaks.  Some fucker with a camera follows them on their date to the small hole-in-the-wall diner with killer cannoli in Calabasas that one of Chris’s friends tells him about.  They’ve been seeing each other long enough without discovery that they’ve both gotten complacent about being careful.</p><p>The creepy fuck must follow them all night, because the photo spread on TMZ the next morning is titled “KAT’S CAP WALK OF SHAME” and features photos of her leaving Chris’s place just before six to make her call on set at six thirty.  The story has some bullshit about her sneaking out of his place even though he’d actually woken up with her and made her coffee while she showered.  Conveniently, none of the photos have him waiting by the door in the shot, only her looking disheveled with a ripe hickey at the base of her neck as she walks to her car.</p><p>The internet fucking explodes.</p><p>--</p><p>Kat & Chris: a modern horror story brought you by internet comment sections.</p>
            </blockquote>





	intolerable acts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [newthingsoveroldthings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/newthingsoveroldthings/gifts).



> This is an extremely belated birthday present for Emilee. My only defense is that it got SO MUCH LONGER THAN I THOUGHT IT WAS GOING TO BE. You are a very talented sweetie pie. <3
> 
> Titled this in keeping with the American Revolution theme. It was this or _The Battle of Bunker Hill_. You probably need to read the first part of this series to make sense of most of the second.
> 
> Blessed be Laria_Gwyn, who keeps me from posting shit with stupid typos.

_you wanna come over tonight?_

_Shooting til midnight. Sorry_

_u can crash at my place if u want, kat_

_Too far_

_i can meet u at ur place_

_Super exhausted. I’m basically going to get home and pass out_

_i can work with that_

_Oh my GOD, chris_

_what?_

_Come on_

_listen, i was talking about feeding u and rubbing ur feet. i am deeply offended by ur insinuations_

_RIGHT. Says the guy who woke me up on Monday in a very inappropriate manner_

_i thought going down on u was a lovely way to wake u up. i certainly don’t remember any complaints. more like, yes yes oh please chris give it to me_

_OMG_

_yeah that too_

_You’re officially the worst. IDEK why we are arguing about this. You’re going to be passed out when I get home anyway_

_am not_

_Dude, you have the sleep patterns of my bubbe these days. Last night you fell asleep to JEOPARDY_

_1 - you wanted to watch that and 2 - you try having four am calls_

_Aww. Poor baby_

_yeah. you want to rub it better?_

_kat?_

_KAT?_

When she steps in the door just after 1am, Chris is passed out face-first in her couch, Millie curled up in a ball on his back. She yawns and leaps off of Chris’s lower back as Kat gets closer and reaches down to turn off the tv with the remote he’s dropped.

“I’m awake, I’m totally awake,” Chris whines sleepily as she hauls him off the couch, leading him to her bedroom.

 

\--

 

When she’s being honest with herself, she can admit that she really doesn’t expect the thing with Chris to go anywhere. The night he shows up at her house and basically fucks her through her mattress after doing things to her in her kitchen that still make her blush when she’s making toast on that part of the counter, she assumes it’s just a matter of them getting this shit out of their system. She’s freshly single, he’s a serial dater, and neither of them is looking for anything serious.

More than that, Chris doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to relationships. A ridiculously nice guy, of course, but also not the kind to linger with women. More of a one hit wonder (pun intended). He’s a master of the date and drop: none of the girls Kat knows who have dated him have ever landed a second date. But, strangely, none of them have a single bad thing to say about him either. It’s like Stockholm syndrome or something.

So, taking all that into consideration, she’s pretty fucking floored when he comes over the next evening with a copy of _The Goonies_ , some take out from a Thai place, and ends up on the floor in front of her couch, Kat’s knees over his shoulders as he goes down on her.

That turns into burritos and Chris trying to sing the praises of a baseball player Kat’s never heard of before they end up fucking in her hallway, trying to make it to her bedroom, but only making it as far as the small linen closet before he just drops to the floor and pushes inside of her. 

That turns into him inviting her over to his place to watch the latest cut of the movie he directed. They make it to a bed this time, her hands twisted into his ridiculous black sheets as his hips snap into hers. Chris really is spectacularly good in bed; he can be a little pushy at times and has a terrible habit of kissing like he’s distracted, but he’s surprisingly unselfish considering how goddamn pretty he is.

(It’s not a cliche; in Kat’s experience, the prettiest guys she’s slept with have, unfailingly, been the worst at getting her off and not particularly caring about it. Until Chris, that is.)

By the second month, Kat has to admit to herself that they might actually be dating, though neither of them has acknowledged it. She’s done the friends with benefits thing, and whatever the hell she’s doing with Chris, it’s not that. They don’t really go out to restaurants or movies or do any of the normal dating shit, but whenever they’re both in town, he invariably ends up at her place or calls her up to tell her to come over, that he’s ordered food from that Ethiopian place she likes. He always spends the night when he comes over to her place and she more often than not crashes at his.

He’s got a couple t-shirts and shorts that have worked their way into her drawers thanks to her relatively non-judgemental housekeeper, and the last time she stayed over at his place, there had been a still-wrapped toothbrush sitting in a cup on his bathroom sink for her.

Basically: Kat has no fucking clue what’s going on. But since he seems happy to avoid discussing it, she’s sure as fuck not going to bring it up either.

“She says he has commitment issues. Sweet, but a little neurotic,” Beth tells her one night over pretty terrible tofu fajitas at her place. Beth knows Minka through Mandy Moore, and has thusly named herself an Evans expert. “But I’m also pretty sure she fucked around on him and that’s why it ended. Nice chick, but man, I would never date her.”

“Yeah, you’re more of a Jennifer Lawrence girl.” 

“Don’t even joke,” Beth sighs. “I mean, I’m straight, but I’d fuck her in a heartbeat. She _gets me_.”

“Oh my god, you met her for thirty seconds at the Valentino launch.”

“Yeah, thirty seconds in which she _got me._ ”

 

\--

 

_where’s ur catnip?_

Kat grabs the phone out of her purse. Make-up has put the most ridiculous fake nails on her and she can barely hold anything in her hands without dropping it. The entire ensemble makes her look like she should be starring in The Real Housewives of New Jersey. She’d sent Chris a selfie a little while ago, to which he’d replied, _I’d hit it_ , because the guy currently camped out at her place is exactly sixteen years old.

Her nails are a bitch on the screen of her iPhone.

_why’’_

_??_

_sorry supsed 2 b qstin mrk_

There’s a pause before her phone beeps again.

_ur never allowed to complain abt my texting again. wheres the catnip?_

Chris is getting the floors redone at his place, so he’s been crashing at her house for the better part of a week. Kat isn’t hating it as much as she thought she was going to, begrudgingly agreeing to have him stay over because… yeah, she’s getting pretty used to getting laid on the regular. It’s a convenience thing. (That’s what she’s telling herself.)

Surprisingly, Chris is a pretty neat house guest. Although it seems like he eats _constantly_ , he also gets groceries and doesn’t leave beer bottles on her counters and makes sure to put the toilet seat down; this alone puts him head and shoulders above any guy Kat’s had stay over. He’s also gotten strangely attached to her cat, shocking considering he’s such a vocal dog guy. Kat boils it down to him missing Chevy, who’s still out in Boston with his mother.

(Frankly, Millie’s a dealbreaker for her. Any guy that doesn’t love her cat isn’t going to last long in her bed.)

_wtf are you doing to my cat?_

_chris?_

_CHRIS?!_

When Kat gets home, Millie’s sprawled across the hallway leading from the foyer to the living room. She barely flops her head over to look at Kat before she rolls onto her back like a lazy slug, pedaling her legs.

“Are you kidding me?” Kat’s had a long day and the shrillness in her voice is palpable.

Millie’s head immediately snaps up, and when she goes rocketing out the door to the kitchen, a little cloud of catnip follows her out, matted in her fur and scattering in the air. It’s all over the fucking floor, which annoys Kat to no end.

“Hey!” Chris yells from the living room over the sound of whatever game he’s watching on tv. “I got tacos!”

Chris is slung out across her couch, his head propped up on the set of ridiculously expensive throw pillows Natalie got her last year for Christmas. He’s in a t-shirt and jeans, and has the beginning of a beard going because he’s in between Marvel shoots, which means his shaving has become irregular at best. Personally, she kind of likes the mountain man look, but her thighs and neck are paying the price.

“Did you get my cat high?” Kat asks, to which Chris grins like a demented gorilla. When she leans down to kiss his cheek, the stench of weed hits her like a mac truck. “Did you get high?”

“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound sorry in the fucking least. Her house still smells like the peppermint candles she’s strategically scattered around the first floor, so at least he had the common sense to smoke it outside. Though she’s not as militant about her disapproval of drinking and drugs as she was in her early years, she still doesn’t want that shit stinking up her house. She’s guessing he probably went out to Mackie’s place and picked up tacos on the way back.

He nudges a bag on the coffee table with his toe. It is surrounded by about six empty wrappers. “Tacos, m’lady.”

Kat plops down on his legs as she reaches for the bag. He lets out a deep grunt and moves until his legs are splayed out around her, his right knee knocking hers.

“It’s lucky you provide food, otherwise you’d be out on the lawn right now, bucko,” Kat says as she shoves a soft-shell taco into her mouth. The food on set was goddawful, so this is the first meal she’s had all day. It’s fucking amazing.

Chris looks contemplative for a moment. 

“I’d be into outdoor sex.”

“Ugh,” Kat grunts, rolling her eyes as she shoves more taco into her mouth.

 

\--

 

Chris ends up having to go to Seoul for a few weeks to shoot an ad for FILA, then to London to film a small part in a Matt Damon movie that Kat had auditioned for before the part was given to Emma Stone. Chris spends the night before the flight at her place, eating pretty mediocre Chinese while they watch old episodes of Ray Donovan still on her TiVo. She’s not particularly in the mood for sex (some girls like having sex during their periods, while Kat is decidedly in the NO THANKS column), so she bats his hands away from her pants when he finally recovers from the exceptional blowjob she gave him.

She drives him to the airport in the morning, though he makes a little noise about taking a cab so he’s not putting her out. She tells him to shut up and get into the fucking car, because it’s just after 5am and there are limits to her patience. 

By the time they’re at the drop-off, the caffeine from her coffee has made her slightly more hospitable. “Nice ass,” she yells loud enough out the window at him as he walks toward the terminal that a few people turn to look. In retrospect, not the best idea, but she can see the way his shoulders shake as he laughs.

It’s strange going from seeing him every day to dealing with shitty timezones because he’s on the other side of the planet. They talk a couple times when he first arrives, but by the end of the second week, it’s radio silence. No texts, no calls, no emails. Kat sends a couple random texts, but they mostly sit unanswered, so eventually she just stops bothering.

(Maybe she’ll end up one of those girls, the girls who have nothing to say about Chris other than he was a nice guy who just never called.)

Kat would be annoyed if she wasn’t so fucking busy. She’s in New York City for two weeks in August auditioning for a part in a play that she ends up having to turn down because their opening is pushed back far enough that it conflicts with her shooting schedule for Two Broke Girls. She spends the next week with a few friends in Tribeca, hitting a couple festivals and eating super fattening food that she’s going to have to spend the next month working off at the gym. 

When she gets off the plane in LA, there’s a text from Chris.

_how r u?_

_Good_ , she texts back the next day because the passive-aggressiveness of it does warm things to her soul. She’s waiting at the garage to be gouged on her Audi yet a-fucking-gain, and there’s a creepy, cologne-soaked dude sitting across from her that keeps trying to make eye contact with her. _You?_

He doesn’t answer.

Needless to say, she’s shocked as fuck when she watches a cab pull into her driveway six hours later, just before dark. She’s given up the ghost of cooking dinner and is reaching for the take-out menus when the headlights filter through her front windows.

She’s got the front door open before Chris even makes it to her steps. His suitcase makes a terrible racket on her stone path.

“Hey,” he says with a quiet smile as the cab pulls out of her driveway. He stops just before the steps, like he’s not sure she’s going to let him inside. At this point, it’s a pretty accurate call.

Kat crosses her arms over her chest and lets her hip rest against the doorframe. “Did you come from the airport?”

“Yeah.” His voice comes out strained, and for the first time, Kat takes stock. He looks like shit; his clothes are rumpled and though his cap blocks what little light is left, she can see what looks like dark circles under his eyes. He must see the challenge she’s trying to throw with her body, because his voice is resigned when he says, “It’s been a shit month.”

And here’s the thing: Kat could tell him to fuck off to his place, curl up on the couch with Millie and eat sodium-laced take out and be perfectly happy. But the truth is she’s fucking missed his stupid face, and she likes it when he crashes at her place, so it’s an argument that can wait for another day. Especially when he looks like he’s been on the losing end of a prize fight with the universe.

“Come on, I’m ordering Thai.”

He follows her into the house, dropping his suitcase by the door and hauling a purring Millie into his arms. “Thanks,” he says softly, kissing her cheek as he walks past her into the living room.

(Chris falls asleep about sixty seconds after they finishing eating, his head resting in Kat’s lap as she watches some movie about vampires that they switched to halfway through. He hums in his sleep when she runs her fingers through his hair.)

 

\--

 

It takes Kat a couple weeks to start noticing the sudden excess of cat toys around her house. Millie has never wanted for much - Kat spoils her girl rotten - and she has a terrible habit of hiding and then resurrecting toys from under the couch and ottoman, but she definitely doesn’t remember the three blue, catnip-filled mice. Or the six balls filled with bells that make a fucking racket when Millie scampers around the house with them.

Then she wakes up late on Thursday, Chris having departed for some meeting a couple hours earlier, and finds some fucking cirque du soleil contraption near her back door when she comes down to turn on the coffeemaker.

_… Chris._

_yassss?_

_Can you please explain to me why there’s a cat jungle gym by my back door?_

_she always looks bored._

_She’s a cat, chris. Bored is her default expression. Bored and when the fuck are you going to feed me_

_but she doesn’t even get 2 walk outside_

_Dude, my house looks like some crazy cat lady’s house_

_i fail to see how this isn’t an accurate descrptn_

She send him two little emojis of shit and promptly tells him to fuck off.

Two weeks later, there’s some sort of wheel contraption under her dining room table and another mouse-on-a-string toy hanging off one of her bar stools.

(“Aww, he’s taking care of your kitty,” Beth croons into her phone lewdly. Kat hangs up on her.)

 

\--

 

She and Chris are casually making out, Chris’s hand snaking down between their bodies to press just right between her legs before going for the button on her jeans, when there’s a loud pounding at her front door.

“Door,” Chris slurs into her mouth as she tries to keep sucking on his tongue.

“Meh,” Kat mumbles back when he gets with the program and bites at her bottom lip, tugging it just enough to get her wet, her entire lower body aching with need.

When whoever it is knocks at the door again, Kat freezes, a sudden chill going down her spine. She knows the impatient sound of that knock. It is the knock that haunts her dreams.

She shoves off of Chris, who whines pathetically in her absence, and makes a beeline to the window with a view of the front of her place.

“Oh _shit_ ,” Kat hisses. That is definitely her mother’s car in the driveway. 

“Katherine, I know you’re home.”

That is definitely her mother’s voice.

Sure enough, when she pulls the curtain back half an inch, her mother is standing at the front door. Kat ducks back behind it as her mother’s head turns toward the window.

“I can _see you_ , Katherine.”

Chris looks confused as hell, his hair ruffled into some kind of fauxhawk. 

“MY MOTHER,” Kat mouths, and Chris cringes a little, reaching up to wipe at the remnants of her lipgloss smeared over his mouth. “One second, I’m coming!” Kat yells, reaching down to rezip her pants and yank at her panties through them. She’s still wet and it’s uncomfortable as hell.

When she looks up, Chris appears shockingly put together considering he was rounding third base no less than a minute ago. The impressive hard-on she’d been rocking against has also somehow disappeared, though she can imagine he feels about as frustrated as she does right now.

“You know, if you’re going to pretend to not be home, it’s best not to park two cars in the driveway, dear,” her mother sighs with an air of annoyance as she walks through the door Kat opens for her. “And then peek through the… Oh!” Her mother spots Chris and her eyes widen. “I’m sorry.”

“Mrs. Dennings,” Chris says politely, nodding his head.

“Litwack, dear,” her mother says with an amused look on her face. While her father has always been pretty understanding of her decision to change her stage name, her mother just refuses to let it go. It’s been grist for the mill for nearly a decade and a half.

There are a few minutes of small talk between them, where it must be painfully obvious to Chris that Kat really hasn’t discussed the progression of whatever the hell is between them with her mother. To be fair, while Kat’s mother has always been far more liberal than most of her friends’ parents, Kat still hasn’t reached the relationship that Chris has with his mother.

Meaning: there’s no way she’s telling her mother that Captain America has been providing her with copious orgasms for the last four months.

This might be why her mother is choosing to punish her by turning to Chris and saying, “Are you bringing Christopher to Ruth’s place for Yom Kippur?”

Kat feels her heart start to fucking pound. She can only imagine how goddamn twitchy she looks. “Um, no.”

“Why not?” her mother says with the sort of smile she normally gets on her face when she catches one of Kat’s siblings in a terrible lie they’ll eventually be forced to confess to. “Your brother and sisters are bringing their spouses, you should bring your boyfriend.”

She actually feels the way her face twitches when her mother calls Chris her boyfriend; the left side shivers like she just stuck her finger into an electrical socket. She wants to tell her mother that so far, their _relationship_ has consisted of ethnic food and blowjobs, but somehow, that seems like the wrong thing to say. “Not my boyfriend, mom.”

She swears for a second that Chris looks a bit hurt. Kat feels like she’s been transported to the twilight zone.

“Really, Katherine?” Her mother is really laying it on thick. Not to mention the fact that Hannah had been dating Ben for nearly a year and a half before she was invited to Yom Kippur. And they had known he’d been planning to propose for a few months. Family meals are serious fucking business for the Litwacks.

She spins on Chris, smiling sweetly. “Wouldn’t you like to come, Christopher?”

Her mother is fucking satan.

Kat actually sucks in a pained breath. This is not going to end well. Her mother is in not-even-trying-to-be-passive-with-her-aggression mode.

“Um,” Chris says, and she really, really feels for the guy because he doesn’t know her mother, but she sure as hell does. Like a grizzly, it’s just better if he plays dead and hopes she bores with feeding on his rotting carcass. “Sure. Of course, Mrs. Litwack. But I’m sure it’s a private family thing.”

“Oh no, dear. You’re always welcome. Katherine’s told me so much about you.” She has told her mother _nothing_. “So shall I tell Ruth you’re coming for dinner?” 

“Okay?” He looks at Kat like he’s asking her permission. Ha. 

“Fabulous!”

Once her mother is finished cornering and interrogating Chris, she leaves with a kiss to Kat’s cheek and a demand to, “Call your mother more than once a year, okay?” Because it wouldn’t be a visit from her mother without at least a small (GIANT) helping of guilt.

“So,” Chris says, watching her mother back her car out of the driveway. “That was…”

“Um,” Kat says, trying not to make it awkward and failing miserably. There’s just no way to casually discuss a topic they’ve been avoiding for months. “Listen, are we dating?”

“You think I get tacos for everyone?” Chris says, trying to play it off as a joke, but the tone is just wrong. He sounds the way he looked earlier, like he’s stuck somewhere between hurt and insulted. She’s so fucking sick of tiptoeing around this shit like she’s afraid of setting off some landmine.

“Well, I’m not psychic, Chris. Plus, you dropped me in a hot second once shit got busy. You didn’t seem very serious about it.”

“I did not.” Whoa. That’s some low simmering anger coming from him. And a load of fucking bullshit.

“Dude, we didn’t talk for like a month and a half when you went to Seoul! Then there was the radio silence when you were in Boston.”

“I was being casual!”

“Casual?”

“Yeah,” Chris says, his eyebrows drawing together like he’s deep in thought. “I didn’t think you wanted anything serious after Josh.”

That knocks Kat on her ass a bit. In all the scenarios she’d run through in her head, she’d assumed Chris was the one looking for casual, not that he thought it would be what she was looking for. Then she has to admit to herself that she was approaching it as casual because _he_ was, and it’s like high school all over again, not being into a boy just in case he was a total fucking bastard and broke her heart. Her sister likes to tell her she has the emotional vulnerability of an armadillo. Which she isn’t sure even makes sense. Whatever.

“So we’re dating?”

“Do you want to?”

Kat’s mouth goes flat and she barely manages to keep from rolling her eyes. “Seriously?”

Chris shrugs and Kat feels her blood pressure starting to rise. He must pick up on it because he steps closer to her and sighs. “Well, between the tacos and the sex, I thought we were, but…”

“So clever. Well considering you just accepted an invitation to meet the fam, I’m glad we nailed this down.” She slides past him and walks back into the living room, reaching down to check her phone for the eventual harried email/text from her sister about inviting people to her house willy-nilly and being respectful of her space blah blah blah. “You realize that my entire family is going to be at this thing right? I am also the only Litwack child that is currently unmarried. There’s a reason I don’t subject the boys I date to my family, and that’s because my family is insane.”

“It’ll be fine,” Chris says with a little laugh. She knows she sounds a little unhinged about her family, but she knows them. They are the best people alive, but they tend to swarm like piranhas around new meat.

“You laugh now, but prepared to be hazed, goyim. My sister-in-law is half-Episcopalian and it took three years of her being married to Ben before my aunts let it go. Meanwhile, I’m bringing home a Boston Irish Catholic. Jesus.” 

Chris smiles. “I’m charming. I’ll charm them.”

She wants to give him a bit more shit because it’s becoming one of her absolute favourite things to do, but she’s also respecting the hell out of the fact that he’s willingly climbing into the lion’s den for her, even though he doesn’t quite fully grasp the extent of his terrible mistake. “Also, you have never seen me eat pork.”

“You mean… like the bacon I saw on your cheeseburger at lunch?” Chris asks with a smarmy grin.

“Exactly, champ,” she says, shoving him back down onto the couch and climbing into his lap again.

 

\--

 

Honestly, after the disaster that is Yom Kippur, Kat is pretty sure her sex gravy train has officially stopped.

(“IS AUNTIE KAT MARRIED TO CAPTAIN AMERICA?” her nephew Joseph screams across her sister’s living room while her aunts quietly discuss Chris’s ass in Hebrew directly in front of him.)

He’d been unflinchingly polite, but it had been impossible for Kat to miss exactly how uncomfortable he’d been by the end. Kat’s developed an exceptionally thick skin to their inquisitionesque tendencies over the last twenty-nine years, but it can be pretty overwhelming for the uninitiated.

(They went from not!dating to her father interrogating Chris like a potential suitor over her sister’s challah in a fucking heartbeat.)

But he comes over the following Thursday with a dozen cupcakes (“Well, aren’t you just so fucking clever,” Kat sighs as she notices the cupcakes spell out GIRLFRIEND!! in the box, rolling her eyes as he plucks up the L and shoves half of it in his mouth) and they end up having ridiculously complicated, athletic sex that nearly ends halfway through because while he may take gymnastics for the Marvel roles, she does not.

“Mom invited you to Thanksgiving in Boston,” Chris tells her, still a bit winded. “I made the mistake of mentioning dinner at your sister’s place in passing and now I’m in deep fucking shit because I made her look unwelcoming and blah blah blah.”

Kat rolls over and whines dramatically into her pillow. Chris follows her body, flopping himself over her back and nipping at her shoulderblade.

“Was Yom Kippur not evidence of the fact that family gatherings are not our forte?” Kat asks, waving her hand toward her face, trying to create a breeze. Chris is about a thousand degrees and draped all over her.

“You don’t understand. This is not optional, Kat.” He rolls her back over and pushes up with his hands so he’s perched over her. “Turning her down will just be a confirmation that you were horribly offended at not being invited to Chez Evans, and I will never hear the end of it.”

“Meh,” Kat grumbles. She’s forgotten how much work dating is outside of fucking and ordering Vietnamese take-out. “This is going to be a disaster.”

“Probably.” Chris grins, leaning down to lick at the curve of her breast. “Also, I don’t care what language it’s in, I know when someone is talking about my ass.”

 

\--

 

Chris gets her a really, really beautiful necklace for Hanukkah to make up for the disaster that is Thanksgiving.

“I am really sorry he puked on your shoes,” Chris sighs.

 

\--

 

Josh sends Kat flowers when her show gets nominated for a couple of People’s Choice awards. They’re beautiful peonies in her favourite colour, and he sends her a sweet note with them. Josh, thankfully, is one of the first exes she’s ever managed to stay friends with, which Kat is taking as a sign of her personal growth and maturity, because at this point, the rest of her life is in fucking shambles.

She still holds a grudge like it’s her job, eats like a frat boy, doesn’t get enough sleep, hasn’t had a physical in like, a decade, and doesn’t floss. She takes her maturity points where she can get them.

Kat tweets a photo of the flowers to say thank you, though she doesn’t say who they’re from. Josh texts her later that night and they end up chatting for a couple minutes on the phone. He’s dating some new up and coming indie artist who has a nose ring and is one of the opening acts for his North American tour, and he sounds cutely excited about her. He’s a good dude; Kat’s actually genuinely happy they managed to stay friends. 

Of course, when Chris picks her up the next day, his eyes immediately zoom to the flowers. While she’s searching for her fucking keys (she never uses the little hook thing that Chris put up near her front door out of pure spite, because she doesn’t appreciate his attempts to organize her - MAYBE SHE LIKES LOOKING FOR HER KEYS FOR TWENTY MINUTES, OKAY?), he subtly circles them, then plucks up the small card near the base of the vase and reads it. 

He’s holding it up with two fingers when she finally finds her keys (in the fruit bowl, jesus).  
“Should I be jealous?” His face is open and he’s smiling like the nerd he is, but there’s a weird little edge to his voice that makes her think that while he is mostly joking, his insecurity is floating right up under the surface.

“I don’t know,” Kat says, wiggling her eyebrows. Frankly, she’d be more jealous of the rumours that started up about her and Sebastian after she was photographed sticking her hand down his shirt on set (“I was fixing a tag, for fuck’s sake!” she had yelled over Beth’s excited bleating about threesomes over the phone), but Chris is an odd duck. “Should I be jealous of you and the Olsen twin?”

Chris laughs, dropping down onto her couch. Millie makes a beeline for his lap and splays herself out like the incorrigible hussy she is. Kat can hear the roar of the purr she lets out as soon as Chris starts petting her tummy. 

“She’s not one of the twins!” he insists, though as soon as the words are out of his mouth, his eyes suddenly unfocus, and he looks contemplative.

“Jesus,” Kat hisses, “you’re thinking about banging a set of twins, aren’t you?”

They both know he has a one track mind, so Chris doesn’t bother denying it, but he still looks a bit indignant when he says, “You’re the one that brought it up.”

“I didn’t bring it up, your dirty perv mind found that gutter all by itself.”

“The last time I checked, you _liked_ my dirty perv mind.”

“Yeah, but it’s like pop rocks: too much of it and it makes you wanna hurl.”

Millie cranes her head to lick at Chris’s fingers and then butt against them, looking for more affection. “You know, I was going to make a joke about how your pussy likes me so much better than you seem to, but I held back.” He smiles at her lewdly. “Because I respect you.”

Kat rolls her eyes. “Yeah, you’re the model of fucking restraint.”

 

\--

 

Inevitably, the news breaks. Some fucker with a camera follows them on their date to the small hole-in-the-wall diner with killer cannoli in Calabasas that one of Chris’s friends tells him about. They’ve been seeing each other long enough without discovery that they’ve both gotten complacent about being careful.

The creepy fuck must follow them all night, because the photo spread on TMZ the next morning is titled “KAT’S CAP WALK OF SHAME” and features photos of her leaving Chris’s place just before six to make her call on set at six thirty. The story has some bullshit about her sneaking out of his place even though he’d actually woken up with her and made her coffee while she showered. Conveniently, none of the photos have him waiting by the door in the shot, only her looking disheveled with a ripe hickey at the base of her neck as she walks to her car.

The internet fucking explodes.

The photos are up at ten, an hour into Kat’s shoot. By the time they break for lunch at noon, she’s got three missed calls from her PR team, one call from her agent, and two from Chris. She’s also got six texts from Chris, the last of which says, _are you okay?_

She can’t quite figure out what the hell is going on, mostly because the one voicemail she has - from Angela, who handles her PR - just tells Kat to give her a call, fucking ASAP. It’s only when Beth looks up from her phone with a sombre look on her face and says, “Someone got photos,” that Kat understands what’s going on.

Her entire chest tightens like it’s stuck in a vise. Beth, for all her loud-mouthed lack of social grace at times, is a good friend and knows when to back off. “I’ll get you an iced coffee and a bagel, ‘kay?” she says as she jumps out of the make-up chair and quietly ushers Caitlin out the door.

Because Kat is a fucking masochist, she looks up the photos. She finds them up on TMZ first, but when she googles her name and Chris’s together? They are fucking _everywhere_. And people are having an absolute field day in the comment sections.

She tries to call Angela twice - straight to voicemail - before her phone rings. Not even the terrible photo of Chris sleeping with his mouth wide open that she’s set as her call notification can crack a smile out of her.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice sounds like he’s just watched a dozen puppies get run over by a steamroller.

“Hey.”

“I am so, so sorry,” he gushes out the second she’s finished speaking. He sounds nervous and angry and sad.

“Uh,” Kat says, still a little shellshocked. Someone has posted a photo with her head photoshopped on Kim Jong Un’s body. The internet is fucking weird. “I’m not sure what you’re apologizing for, except for failing to walk me to my car like a gentleman.”

She knows exactly why he’s apologizing, though she wants to talk about it as much as she wants to shut a car door on her fingers. Kat has a very healthy ego, but she’s also been made painfully fucking aware that other than her ample tits and round ass, she is generally the antithesis of what Hollywood beauty is supposed to be. And hooking up with _Captain America?_ She’s no ugly duckling, but Chris is fucking gorgeous.

“I fucking hate that they do this,” Chris says.

“Personally, Dreamincolor423 doesn’t see the long-term feasibility of our relationship given the complexity of my sexual history,” Kat summarizes, scrolling down the page on her iPad. She knows she should stop reading this shit, but her masochistic streak is apparently even wider than she thought. “Ooh, I see she’s using the less popular H-O-A-R-E spelling.”

“Kat.”

She sighs. “I’m fine, I’m fine. You know how many _he’s in it for the tits!_ comments I got when I was dating Tom?” She taps her fingers against the armrest. “Like, a lot. It’s okay, I’ll survive.”

She stops joking when she hears the sound of his voice as he says, “It’s not okay.”

“I know. I appreciate that you care, I really do. But if I focus on this, it’s going to drive me crazy, so I am going to take a delightfully unruffled approach to this if it’s okay with you.”

“I seriously don’t even know why anyone would want to fucking date me,” he says and he sounds a bit mournful. It’s fucking sad, really.

“Um, because you’re a stellar lay?” Kat jokes, which finally - finally - earns her a laugh. “Seriously, though. I assumed something would have to go to shit to even out the cosmic balance. Just go down on me tonight and we’ll call it all even, yeah?”

Chris laughs again, and she can hear the smile in his voice when he says, “Done.”

The really, really lovely vase of flowers waiting for her after she finishes taping for the day helps things too, even if she does text back, _enough flowers, more gay porn._

 

\--

 

Then a few of the less reputable gossip blogs decide to resurrect Kat’s nude leak because they are human shit stains, and Chris loses his fucking mind.

Amy, who is Chris’s handler for Marvel (technically she’s his PR and image consultant, but everyone knows that Robert, both of the Chrises, and Jeremy each have a handler with a fancy title), calls her during a readthrough at the studio, frantic. Amy had subbed for Hemsworth’s handler during the press tour of Thor 2 after Lydia had broken her leg skiing, so Kat generally knows that Amy is a pretty cool cucumber who rarely gets rattled. The sound of her voice makes Kat’s blood go cold.

“Please,” Amy says, speaking quietly into the phone. “I have Extra on the set today and I need you to calm him down. I don’t need to tell you how bad this can be.”

In the fifteen minutes it takes her to drive to the lot that Marvel is shooting some internal scene on, she checks her twitter feed at a red light. Chris has updated for the first time in nearly a month. All it says is, _How fucking dare you_.

This alone drives Kat’s blood pressure into the danger zone. Even when Chris has been pissed, she’s never seen any of it bleed into twitter or the press; he’s exceptionally cautious about his public image and the things that he says to the media. The fact that he’s being so openly hostile and aggressive puts her on edge.

By the time she actually makes it on set, Amy’s managed to corral Chris into his trailer, though Kat can hear him pacing and talking to himself inside before she knocks on the door, tentatively opening it.

His cheeks are a bit red, and his mouth looks like it’s set to a permanent scowl. “Kat?”

She hops up the last few steps; before she even takes the last one, he’s already got his arms wrapped around her waist, squeezing her into him. He’s wearing the goddamn suit again, which makes him uncomfortably hard and pokey, but she just sighs and lets him hold onto her. “I’m so fucking sorry,” he whispers into the hair just above her ear.

“Babe,” Kat says, trying to remain calm because Chris is still angry enough that he’s practically vibrating against her, “I really appreciate that you want to defend me, but you can’t say anything.”

“I want to fucking kill them.”

“I know you do, and while yes, I do want to gut them like the swine shit they are, if you go out and rant about this, you’re going to a) give Amy a massive coronary, and b) turn this into something that people other than the fucking dickless trolls on the internet care about. It was a non-story the first time, it’s a non-story now, but if you go on Extra to yell at them, those photos are going to be everywhere tomorrow.”

He looks so _hurt_. Kat isn’t even sure how to process it. It’s weird to be both angry for herself and for Chris, who is taking this even harder than she had the first time. “This is so incredibly unfair to you.”

“I know. It was a shitty thing to do, and your gender has a lot of fucking explaining to do. But I’ve decided that I don’t fucking care. They’re my boobs, they’re awesome, and fuck everyone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You need to stop apologizing for shit that you didn’t do, okay?” She tilts her chin up to look at him, and the second she meets his eye, he dips his head and kisses her sweetly.

“It is, though.”

Kat squeezes him just enough to be threatening. “It really fucking isn’t, so please shut up.” She looks up at him again. “After you promise me you’re not going to say anything out there. Amy has a newborn that would like her mother stroke-free, okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, like he regrets it as soon as it comes out of his mouth. 

 

\--

 

Then George Clooney announces he’s getting divorced the same week Kim Kardashian gives birth to a son named Yeezus Kanye West.

Kat inquires about sending them both thank you fruit baskets.

(Amy gets quiet on the other end of the line and says, “No,” flatly.)

 

\--

 

Kat attends the premiere of Cap 3 a few weeks later, ostensibly as a member of the Marvel family (and because the post-credits scene is a lead for Thor 3), but as she stands for photos, every fucking photographer is screeching about Chris. HOW’S CHRIS? WHERE IS CHRIS? DID YOU GUYS COME TOGETHER? DID YOU BREAK UP? IS HE A BOXERS OR BRIEFS GUY?

Because Kat is a fucking troll, she yells, “Commando!” and turns down the red carpet, not stopping until she reaches the theatre. She really, really hopes they ask Chris if he’s wearing underpants. It’s about time there was equality of the sexes in that regard.

(“Babe, why were they yelling that you told them I go commando?” Chris asks pointedly as he takes his seat next to her in the theatre. She just laughs and pats his cheek.)

A month after the premiere, a couple paps catch them in a friend’s backyard for a pool party. She thinks she looks fucking great (red bikinis work for her), but of course, someone calls her a whore (correct spelling this time!) for sitting in Chris’s lap, and another points out that her tits are like, totally falling out of that top, and doesn’t she have any self-respect?

Basically, she’s the source of some Grade A bitter jealousy, and it actually feels kind of nice. Chris still gets incredibly bent out of shape about it all, but she’s decided to find his protective tendencies endearing.

By the time summer hits, they are old news. In the world of Hollywood, two Marvel actors hooking up only holds appeal for so long. The paps only follow them around if they hit areas with high celeb-traffic or go to premieres, which is almost never. Chris finally chills a bit, and things return to their pre-outing casualness.

In June, Kat posts her first photo of Chris. Though Chris doesn’t really do social media other than twitter and almost never posts personal photos, the shot she gets of Chris passed out on her couch with Millie tucked up under his chin like she’s trying to spoon him is too cute not to post. Chevy’s stretched out over his legs, but looks decidedly put off that Millie’s got the prime location.

(It had taken Millie exactly three seconds to establish who owned the house the first time Chris brought Chevy over.)

“Really?” Chris says as they’re eating rather sub-par Indian, watching Last Week Tonight. Millie is curled up in the dog bed in the corner that Kat bought for Chevy, and Chevy is sprawled out in front of it, quietly whining. When Kat leans over and looks at the screen on his phone, she can see the photo she posted to twitter.

Kat shoves a spoonful of butter chicken in her mouth. “I was going to caption it, _a pushover for my pussy_ , but I restrained myself.” She grins smugly. “Because I respect you.”


End file.
